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A new draft proposal at the Internet Engineering Task Force by Phillip Hallam-Baker sets out a work program to harden the Internet against Prism-style surveillance. It's a long but fascinating read, and it's been nicely summarized by ParityNews's Ravi Mandalia, who highlights the proposal's emphasis on Perfect Forward Secrecy and strong crypto by default. Last week, I posted John Gilmore's firsthand account of NSA sabotage of a IETF standard; it will be interesting to see how the NSA engages with this process.
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James from the New America Foundation sez, "I wanted to share this blog post on why civil society voice is essential in Internet governance and some efforts shift control to government-only entities:"

While Indian courts are attempting to control content domestically, a simultaneous effort from Indiaâ€™s national government is focused on increasing governmental control of the global Internet. Last October, India submitted a proposal to the United Nations for the creation of a UN Committee for Internet-related policies (CIRP). CIRP would be a government-only body tasked with overseeing Internet governance and standards setting.

This would alter the current landscape of international Internet governance, which is a multi-stakeholder process including civil society as well as government actors. The US-based public policy organization Center for Democracy and Technology describes the current model as "bottom-up, decentralized, consensus-driven approach in which governments, industry, engineers, and civil society" contribute to policy outcomes. The distribution of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and top level domains, for example, is managed by Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a non-profit organization. Organizations like Internet Engineering Task Force and the World Wide Web Consortium work together with engineers to develop standards.